She disappeared from Glendale, Arizona.
She was five days shy from her 15th birthday.
Earlier today, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
released this age-progressed photograph.
This is the age progression that I did for Alicia Navarro.
As a forensic artist, I create age progressions
for children that have been missing for decades.
I do see myself as part scientist, part artist, but mostly artist.
So my work has helped with recoveries of six missing children.
[SUPER_USERS]
[TIKTOK FORENSIC ARTIST]
My name is Paloma Galzi, and I am a forensic artist
with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
I think I’m going to talk about Alicia Navarro.
Her name is Alicia Navarro, a high-functioning autistic girl
who vanished possibly after meeting a stranger online.
And her mom says two years ago she left a note saying,
“I ran away. I will be back. I swear. I’m sorry.”
Alicia Navarro disappeared when she was only 14 years old
from Glendale, Arizona, in 2019.
Nobody knows what really happened,
but her mother is really concerned because before she disappeared,
she was corresponding online with strangers.
I was searching and trying to find clues, like what happened?
Did she take anything?
She didn’t take her clothes.
She took, like, three sweaters were missing.
She is, on this image, age progressed to 17 years old.
So I had a lot of pictures to go on.
With her mom being very present on social media,
I had access to a lot of pictures of her and her mom.
I have faith that I will find my daughter, wherever she is.
I will never stop looking for her.
So you can see I add different facial features
with a little bit of aging in it.
If we do age progressions on toddlers or children,
some things that are changing are going to be,
the length of the face, for example, is going to change.
So everything from the nose down is going to drop a little bit,
so it’s going to be an elongated face.
Once that has set in puberty,
the face, you know, length and shape usually don’t change.
The eyebrows as well,
they’re mostly going to stay similar,
and then just going to droop a little bit to the corner
because of gravity,
but that’s pretty much it.
When I start with an age progression case,
I spend a lot of time just looking at the image.
We try to gather a lot of reference pictures
from family members, if available,
because that will help us to see how the family members grew old,
and we can apply some of that to our case.
If I age a child from five years old to eight years old,
there are going to be some changes.
But the main changes that we look for are for aging or puberty.
Age progressions usually take about a day to a day and a half to create,
depending on the quality of the image,
if we have reference pictures, etc.
However, facial reconstruction, if we do a 3D one on the software,
that’s going to take about three days to do.
Our case managers are in contact with either law enforcement
or the families.
So those images are going to go through either one of them
for final approval.
And if this is approved,
we are going to be able to post it on our website, missingkids.org.
So my username on TikTok is galziforensics,
and I think I have about 196k followers.
Some of my videos had gotten millions of views.
It's also a great way to put our images out there for people to see
and try to get some leads out of that.
For facial reconstructions,
we create those based off human remains of children
that have not been identified.
It’s kind of a last resort situation to help with the investigation
to see if somebody would recognize them.
So this is when the skull has been scanned.
We get the CT scan file,
and we are able to put it under our 3D software.
We’re missing some bits and pieces, of course.
It’s not perfect.
But we have enough information
for us to be able to recreate all of this.
For this case, I had access to skull pictures and not a scan.
We keep all our images for facial reconstructions in black and white
because there are three things that we cannot determine.
And they are hair color, skin color, and eye color.
Because we can’t determine this,
we don’t want to assume anything.
And so we keep everything in black and white.
We grab some facial features from other images
that we think would fit the skull
and we apply it to our case to create an image.
When we do these in 2D,
we have a lot of details that are given from the skull.
For example, the opening of the nasal area of the skull
will be able to determine how wide the nose was in life.
Same for the lip thickness,
the position of the eyes.
So we have all of this indication from the skull
that we are going to be able to apply to the facial reconstruction.
The way I was trained in my master’s in forensic imaging
is that we had a lot of anatomy classes.
We also had dissection classes, aging process classes,
and live drawing classes and all this.
So it helps me in my drawings
to create an age progression that is going to be accurate.
When we recover children,
we sometimes are able to
get the pictures of what they look like now,
and we can compare that to our age progressions.
And sometimes we’re really spot on, and it’s wonderful to see.
That’s always very heartwarming
to know that your work helped those children
to be back home and safe.